Independent of Fate
by A. Lee
Summary: Parting ways at the island was a good thing, Fuu keeps telling herself.


Parting ways at the island was a good thing, Fuu keeps telling herself. She'd grown to rely on them too much, to depend on their rescuing her. Why, she remembers when the journey's only just begun – she'd been waiting tables and rescuing herself, whether it was escaping whorehouses in the middle of the night or otherwise dealing with circumstances as they presented themselves.

Slowly, though, she'd grown soft. She'd started sitting around waiting to be rescued – that's why she ended up captive, watching helplessly on the sidelines while Jin and Mugen fought for her, yet she could do nothing.

She'd thought on this for many long days and nights while she waited for Mugen and Jin recovered. The longest had been the first few days when neither drifted out of consciousness and she had _nowhere_ near enough medical training to fix them, and she hadn't been at all sure what the future would hold. As she'd held her breath and hoped and even prayed that they would heal, she'd also had plenty of time to think about the places they had been, and the things they had done, and whether this journey was at its end.

And as she considered her own actions from start to finish, she could see the way she'd grown weaker over the course of the journey, and stronger, at the same time.

In any case, splitting up really was the best for a number of reasons. It was easier to evade the Shogunate this way, she told herself. It was time for Mugen and Jin to mature on an emotional level, she assured herself. Jin would be going back to Shino anyways, and Mugen onwards to who knew where. As for _her_? It was probably time for her to find some husband willing to marry a wandering girl of dubious virtue, settle down, and maybe start up a teahouse. She still had a few _ryo_ sewn into the lining of her _yukata_.

The point was, they had different objectives now. They would be moving in different directions. Goodbyes were inevitable.

So when the time finally came to part at the crossroads, it was a symbolic final farewell. They may have been on an island with just the one ferry station, but even if their paths took them to the ferry station at the same time, they would meet as strangers. Or at the least, as people who were acquainted, but were on different journeys with different destinations.

(It'd been so easy for Fuu to get disgustingly introspective as she'd tended to Mugen and Jin. That's what happens when you don't have reticent samurai and crude pirates distracting you.)

It had hurt a little when she and Mugen and Jin had, quite by coincidence, run into each other at Nagasaki. At any other time and in any other place – in any other story – they would have laughed at this sign of the fate underpinning their companionship, and joined paths again. But it was too soon – and so they'd just nodded in acknowledgement and walked past each other.

It had been _that_ easy to walk away. She hadn't realized.

She soon found that it was easier for a young girl traveling alone to locate free accommodations and temporary teahouse jobs. Not safer, certainly, not when everyone sees a "young girl on her own" and immediately thinks "helpless." It was easier to garner sympathy, but at the same time she was more vulnerable and made a more obvious target to the rough types that existed in every village. For those occasions, she had her little _tanto_, along with a few other nasty surprises hidden about herself that she'd adopted. It never hurt to be too careful.

Nevertheless, the protective spirit of MugenandJin seemed to remain with her, and she made it back to her hometown without much hassle. There, people knew her a little, even if they did not know what she had done for the last few years, where she had gone, why she was back. But they knew enough for her to get a job at a teahouse, even if the teahouse was a dingy one right next door to the only whorehouse in town.

Fuu tells herself that she works the teahouse because it's the most stable job available to her. She'd already spent enough time in a whorehouse for one lifetime, so that's out of question. She'd briefly considered working the dice, but cooperating with the _yakuza_ almost invariably resulted in an early death sooner or later. She'd considered and discarded the idea of setting up a food stand – it was too risky and unstable, especially since she wasn't a great cook to begin with.

Teahouses are respectable, and one day she might find a boy and carry on a normal life. Or at least that's what she tells herself …

And if Mugen ever drops by the whorehouse next door or Jin ever stops at the swordsmith across the street, well, Fuu certainly didn't _plan_ for her teahouse to have such prime vantage points over their most likely pit stops should they breeze through the town, so if she _accidentally_ run into them, it'd just another sign from fate, wouldn't it?


End file.
